Pro Video Coalition by Dennis Radeke

64 or 32?  Which one to use today?

I blogged on a tutorial from Event DV around editing workflows with AVCHD.  In that same issue, contributor Jan Ozer wrote an article called CS4 at 64 that delves into the differences that he observed between Adobe applications and how they perform differently between 32bit Windows XP and 64bit Windows Vista.

For me, it’s clear that 64 bit operating systems are becoming more mainstream - or at least among content creators.  The benefits for consumers may be less obvious at present, but I believe it’s just a matter of time.  Over time we have seen consumer PC’s slowly grow in memory and performance from 64MB to 512MB to 2GB and now we’re starting to see 4GB as standard in many value PC’s and even some laptops.  With more software and services available, it means more things running at one time.  In the same way, I believe that XP’s 4GB limit is being felt by creatives today and consumers in a very short while. When it hits consumers, we’ll start to see the shift towards 64bit and away from 32bit.

In the article, Jan lays out his personal findings about CS4 performance between 32 and 64bit systems and his results were pretty amazing. He experienced performance gains between 13% and 227%.  In fact, besides the 13% difference for DVCProHD, all of his findings and results were 50% and above.  That’s the kind of performance gains that we can all be excited about. read more...